Unions face challenge to recruit youth: Howes

“All of us are on trial through what is going on at the moment” ... AWU national secretary Paul Howes.
Photo: Tamara Voninski

by
Michaela Whitbourn

When the Australian Council of Trade Unions was considering speakers for its inaugural youth congress in Sydney, there was a union boss who fitted the Generation Y bill.

The 30-year-old national secretary of the Australian Workers Union,
Paul Howes
, was “the only national secretary we could find who was actually born after 1980", ACTU secretary
Jeff Lawrence
joked yesterday.

Mr Howes, who was dubbed a “faceless man" for his role in unseating former prime minister Kevin Rudd, didn’t shy away from the challenges facing the union movement in recruiting younger members. “We have a union movement . . . which is dominated by older people," he told a crowd of fresh-faced Labor voters and a handful of greying specimens.

A report released at the congress, Youth: Building the Future, noted that 77 per cent of Australia’s 2 million union members was aged over 35.

Mr Howes, who is also a vice-president of the ACTU, said the union movement faced deep structural problems organising and representing young people in the white-collar industries they dominated, such as finance.

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Youth itself was not the problem. Unions in blue-collar industries, including the Australian Workers Union, did not encounter the same problems in attracting young workers. “The problem is how do we get in and make ourselves relevant to those [workers] that aren’t necessarily selling their labour for profit but selling their intellect for profit," Mr Howes said.

“Outside of the public service we really haven’t got the model right."

Unless unions could extend their reach into new industries and increase their density in workplaces where they already had a foothold, they would become “increasingly isolated fortresses of unionism competing in a . . . huge sea of non-unionised workplaces," he warned.

Youth activities, including the congress, was one way to attract the Gen Y demographic, as was social media such as micro-blogging site Twitter.

The national office of the AWU had been restructured so that it was easier for younger people to become officials. The average age in the national office was now 27, but Mr Howes said it was difficult to encourage young workers to take a significant pay cut to take on such roles.

“I love having young people working for our union, you can pay them less and they work harder," he quipped.